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April 8 - November 8, 2020
The way certain groups of people use sacred words gives the rest of us the holy heebie-jeebies.2 Holy phrases become tools of manipulation in the hands of angry religious leaders. They are fashioned into clubs by combative evangelists. And when shouted from the mouth of a street preacher outside a football stadium, Scripture becomes downright annoying.
I have friends who say that the most “loving” thing they can do is tell their “lost” friends that they are going to hell. The use of their words defines a meaning I cannot accept. Love is drained of compassion and forged into a machete, and Lost no longer describes the inability of all humans to find our way forward on our own. Their words separate a lesser them from a better us.
If we fail to stoke the flames, they will snuff out. And if we misuse them, the flames rage and people run for their lives. As with real fire, it can either heat our homes or burn them to the ground. In our current age, it seems, the fire of sacred speech is fading due to indifference and ignorance and avoidance. Bonfires have become campfires, campfires have become embers, and embers have become ashes.
But the Aboriginal language spoken in that region of Australia—along with a third of the world’s languages—use cardinal directions, which direct toward the four points on a compass, to discuss space. Someone speaking one of these languages might say something like, “My knife is southeast of my plate” or “Jackie is standing to the north of Trisha.”5 Because of their language, they are always aware of the sun’s position in the sky and develop an awareness of their changing orientation as they navigate their surroundings.
If someone asks you to recount an event or recall a memory, your language conditions you to assign agency, even if an action was accidental. But if you speak a language like Japanese or Spanish, the agent of causality is usually dropped, even if someone was at fault.
People groups who speak more about now than in the future think more about today than tomorrow. They are more likely to spend their money, smoke, and practice unsafe sex. The data indicates that if a person speaks about the future as a time distinct from the present, he will perceive it as more distant and less pressing.11
You might call us Homo verba. We are word-shaped beings who live word-shaped lives within word-shaped communities.
Our words may not cause plants to sprout, but they can make hope spring forth in a human heart. God birthed us with words, and now we find ourselves in constant labor, giving birth ourselves through the power of words. When we release words into the air, like the first ones spoken, they create worlds both glorious and dark.
Jesus loved language so much that he often delivered odes to linguistics.11 He said good people should utter life-giving language, that we will have to justify the way we speak in the afterlife, and that humans can’t live by bread alone but by nourishment from divine words. It’s no wonder, then, that the last command Jesus gives his disciples was to go into all the world and speak God.
Often when someone talks about the “original meaning” of a word, she is just referring to whichever modern interpretation she has accepted.2
Building a fence around our spiritual vocabulary accomplishes little if there’s trouble inside the camp.
While it may be necessary to avoid certain words in exceptional situations, substitution is ultimately unsustainable. It often shrinks the vocabulary of faith, rather than expands it. Substitution avoids linguistic problems, rather than resolving them, and struggles to root itself in a sacred scripture where these words remain despite our discomfort.7
We may choose not to use the word retarded because it is unnecessarily hurtful to those with mental challenges. But we should not pretend that purging this word from our vocabulary solves our collective insensitivity to those people or their problems. The hard work still remains. We have only fooled ourselves into thinking we have solved a problem that still very much exists.
Religion without God is like a human without a heart.
ancient Jews did not treat sacred words like most modern Christians, as static objects with fixed definitions. Ancient Jews believed words were malleable. These terms didn’t convey a solitary meaning, but rather many meanings at the same time. Rather
The word for “love” (אהבה) in Deuteronomy was used broadly in the ancient Near East in political treaties to describe enforced loyalty to the dominant party. According to Baden, a king would tell a vassal, “You are obligated to love me, which is to say, to be obedient to me.” In this light, the verse comes across more like a threat than a thoughtful solicitation.
The word for “righteousness” or “to be in the right” was used originally to refer to a person in a courtroom who wins a case.
The word for “convert” in the Hebrew Bible is the same as the word for “resident alien” or “stranger in the land.” As with “love,” these words morph with time.
Millennia ago, no single authority stated, “This particular definition is what this word means, forever.” Throughout most of history meanings were worked out in community with the help of discernment.
Modern Christians are children of both Merriam-Webster and King James. We often approach language like chemistry or algebra rather than like poetry or painting.
dictionaries don’t explain what words mean. They only tell us how words are used.
Modern Christians are children of both Merriam-Webster and King James. We often approach language like chemistry or algebra rather than like poetry or painting. This suffocates sacred language, making it unrecognizable to the ancients of the Judeo-Christian tradition. We need a dose of courage and imagination to revive the vocabulary of faith.
These Jewish thinkers treated language not as a corpse but as a living being with which we are invited to dance.
Conservative God-speakers often remain in the first stage. They don’t want to get lost because they believe they are already home.
Speaking God from scratch means planting the vocabulary of faith in the fertile soil of the present moment so it can come back to life and even grow into something more beautiful than we first imagined.
It’s scary to say yes. It’s risky to say yes. It’s costly to say yes. And as Christians we are taught to say no to a lot of choices. But speaking the y word with conviction and hope is one of the most Christlike things we can do.
As conservative theologian Justin Holcomb says, “If a believer genuinely accepts the Nicene Creed, they should not be dubbed a heretic.”9
Yesterday’s heretics often become today’s role models. Christian leaders from Martin Luther to Martin Luther King Jr. were called heretics. And Jesus wasn’t crucified for being an orthodox rabbi who always colored inside the lines. He was executed for heresy, and you would be hard-pressed to find an influential religious leader in his time who disagreed with that verdict. Not every false teaching should be called heresy, and not every “heresy” turns out to be a false teaching.
The expectations you placed on God ferment into distrust, into disappointment. As author Anne Lamott says, “Expectations are resentments under construction.”
Perhaps the greatest threat to faith is not doubting God but being disappointed with God.
At the start, the crowds embrace Jesus with dopamine levels soaring and shouts of “Save us now!” As soon as Jesus turns out to be something other than the Savior they expect, their hosannas morph into “Crucify him!”
Jesus is a king but not the kind they wanted. He will serve rather than be served. He will die and not be killed. He enters unarmed, waging peace. This makes a larger point, that God does not intend to meet our expectations. Instead, God intends to meet our needs.
The story begins with expectation and ends with disappointment. The crowd has come to the festival, but they can’t stomach the funeral. They join the celebration, but they will not stay for the crucifixion. They are willing to sing, but they will not suffer.
Disillusionment is, well, the loss of an illusion. It is what happens when you take a lie—about the world, about yourself, about those you love, about God—and replace it with the truth. Disillusionment occurs when God shatters our fantasies, tears down our idols, dismantles our cardboard cutouts. It is the result of discovering that God does not conform to our expectations but rather exists as a mystery beyond those expectations.
I was being drawn away from an apologetic framework into a more mystical framework. I was leaning into ambiguities and tensions and doubts, and it was actually strengthening the resolve of my faith. I began to understand, as Thomas Aquinas once noted, that the highest knowledge of God is to know that we do not know God. In this framework, embracing the mystery of God is the high-water mark of faith.
A mystery is not something that is unknowable; it is something that is infinitely knowable.”
What if I began to replace questions about the historicity of the story and instead welcomed questions about the truth of the story?
In some ways, the Protestant Reformation was as much a linguistic revolution as a theological one. The notion of sin as a debt had metathesized into something that no longer worked. Martin Luther and other revolutionaries hit the Reset button on the vocabulary of faith.
The concept of brokenness is rarely mentioned in the Bible. The closest example might be when the psalmist writes about a broken heart and a crushed spirit.3 The writer references something that happens to us, rather than something we are. And instead of speaking about brokenness as making someone less than, the author says that God is especially close to those in such a state.
“Born again” Christians use feminine language for God even if they don’t realize it. They may resist the notion in theory, but the phrase is inherently feminine. Western Christians are accustomed to thinking about the hands of God and the face of God, but not the womb of God or the breasts of God. Yet the Bible introduces all these metaphors.
Making a single image of God the only way to see God is, in a literal sense, idolatry.9
The Bible’s most significant contribution to the notion of family is the way it radically redefines the term in a spiritual framework. The primary family bond in the New Testament is the family of God. These bonds are spiritual, rather than genetic or legal. They are neither nuclear in form nor perfect in execution. This family is compromised of a wide array of people unrelated by blood or marriage.
Jesus seems to speak of being lost in a different way than do many who follow his teachings. Lost-ness is the state of being separated from the community and in need of reconciliation, but Jesus does not equate it here with evil or sinfulness. Instead, Jesus gives a sweeping picture of lost-ness that encompasses all who wonder and wander.
“The father is convinced that the younger, the prodigal, is the one who is lost, and in many respects he is correct,” writes Levine. “However, we find out at the end of the parable that the son who is in fact ‘lost’ is the elder. The owner spots the missing sheep among the hundred, and the woman spots the missing coin among the ten. The father, with only two sons, was unable to count correctly.”3
Jesus teaches that some people are lost and need to be found; other people are lost but assume they have already been found. The second group, as Jesus tells it, is worse off.
While we often use the term lost to refer to someone who needs to get her act together and start following the rules, in these stories, Jesus uses lost to mean loved, valuable, and worth pursuing. People who are “lost” are precious, not pitiful.
back to “Word.” What a shame. Because John was trying to tell us that Jesus was not a single word in isolation but rather an ever-expanding and ongoing speech into which we are invited to participate.
Words can help explain and describe, but only to a point. At some point the Conversation must be wrapped in flesh. If you want to truly describe grace, for example, you have to move beyond just speaking about it and start embodying it too. We must learn to live our lexicons.
